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Comment by baakss | Hacker News Reader

Wunderground and weather.com were owned by the same company? For some reason I never would have guessed that just based on my experience on those sites.

Wunderground generally feels clean and on-topic.

Weather.com is often filled with "Doomsday scenario with newest hurricane season" and "Check out this massive shark jumping" news stories.

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Once I visited weather.com and every image, literately every image, was a reference to an imminent cataclysmic event. Volcanoes exploding in fire, meteorites exploding over cities, etc. It's hard to differentiate weather.com from a parody of weather.com.

That, my friend, is known as effective market segmentation.

Yup, it is all about giving consumer a "choice".

The Weather Channel acquired Wunderground.com in 2012: http://www.wunderground.com/about/pr/news.asp?date=20120702

They probably didn't want the competition anymore because I don't think the Weather Channel has learned a damn thing about how to run a clean website since acquiring Wunderground. On the plus side, it appears they have left Wunderground to do their own thing and not interfere.

Prior to being acquired they were a much lighter weight and usable site. Now they are almost as bad as weather.com with ads and unnecessary UI clutter

I agree. These days the wunderground site drags my 2009 iMac to an almost total standstill. I don't really understand how they screwed it up so bad :-(

They've been owned by the same company for less than a year, I believe.

> For less than a year now

More than that now, I ran into a guy in the Haight wearing a WUnderground fleece about 3 years ago, right after the buyout and told him it was my favorite weather website and that I hoped Weather.com wouldn't ruin it.

He then told me he was on the Weather.com team who led the buyout -- Oops. He still offered to send me a WUnderground hoodie though, so kudos to him for having a sense of humor.

First article I found re: the buyout in 2012;

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/us/as-weather-channel-buys...

Wow time flies.

I have no problems using Weather.com. I just type in the url, they've got my locations of interest up at the top, I click on one, get a quick forecast and can drill down into different segments like "The Weekend" "10-Day Forecast" and easily get the "Map-In-Motion" doppler.

Any extraneous stuff I notice but filter out automatically. I love the site and don't have any of the sort of issues you've described. I do seem to have a higher tolerance for the minor inconveniences of life when I compare my experience to those of the people who surround me, so maybe I'm just lucky. I think you can develop this attitude though, and it sounds like it would help ease your way through the world.

Unless I'm misreading your last sentence, I think you vastly overestimate how much it annoys me.

The only issue I described was extraneous noise on the website (most of which has nothing to do with weather). It's just less usable/aesthetically pleasing than the alternatives.

I'm not losing sleep over it or anything. I just use the alternative site instead.

Whatever you do DON'T buy the ad free Weather Underground app! If you forget your password they will ignore any requests to reset it or, for that matter, any support requests. Sure it's just $.99 but as far as I'm concerned they rip people off.

Inspite of being completely superfluous I kind of like the entertainment on the Weather Channel and their website. They have done a good job making an otherwise boring topic entertaining.

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